Maybe you've already heard about this: A 23-year-old Chicago bartender named Stephanie wanted to return to college for a biology degree but couldn't afford rent and tuition, even though she works two jobs. Stephanie's story illustrates a point I've been making for a few weeks now: One of the least-covered crises dragging down the nation's economy is the strain that college debt has placed on graduates and their families, and the obstacles that potential debt places in the paths of young people who want to earn college degrees.

In some cases, the spectre of debt leads young people to forego college altogether. Others dive in, take the necessary loans and hope for the best. In Stephanie's case, she watched a roommate donate her own eggs to a fertility clinic and collect $7,000.

"I want to go back to college, and it is really a matter of needing the money," she told ABCNews.com. "I go to the doctor tomorrow to get put on birth control, so that my cycle matches whoever ends up carrying my egg. Once I'm on it for three weeks, then I'll have to start injecting myself with hormones."

Stephanie said if not for the faltering economy, she would not be donating her eggs. Fertility clinics across the country from Atlanta to Los Angeles told ABCNews.com that they have seen an increase in the number of women seeking information or actively donating eggs in the past six months, with many women claiming the lagging economy as their motivator.

"I make roughly $800 a week. The $7,000 will help, but its not going to pay for an education. I'm still going to have to take out loans," Stephanie said. "Having the extra money alleviates some of the stress of being able to afford college. I'm worried that my rent keeps going up, and I feel like this gives me a cushion. I don't have a car, so I don't need gas money, but I really need it for rent money."

Like her roommate, Stephanie will collect $7,000, and she'll be able to donate to that fertility clinic up to six more times.

I'm grateful to see more people talking about their college debt issues online, in blogs and elsewhere. At RocktheVote.com, a poster named Whitney writes, "In 2007, I graduated from a 4-year private university. I came from an upper middle class family in California that made enough to afford a house payment, car payments, car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, and other general odds, ends and occasional wants. But we didn't have $45,000 per year for college tuition. With our financial system the way it is, and the way need-based help is calculated, it was decided that my family had an extra $25,000 to spare towards tuition. Now with more loans then I could imagine and interest accumulating, I owe more money then I will make in my first and maybe even second year out of college."

And an honors-level graduate called Ancient Guru writes,

I've been enrolled in a year-round program for the past 3 years getting my BA in Game Arts & Design. I finished in July, graduated with a 3.61 GPA (cum laude) and around $80,000 in college loan debt.  Huzzah for all of that. During this time I was also working at the college, but that job evaporated once I graduated, so now I'm on the hunt for a real job. I have a few prospects, but not many. Most jobs in the industry want prior experience which I obviously don't have yet.

But thankfully, Stephanie, Whitney and Ancient Guru haven't sunk so deep in the emotional turmoil that accompanies debt that they consider extreme measures.

Author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a column on July 29 highlighting one of the worst-case scenarios of Americans dealing with debt, the story of Carlene Balderrama of Taunton, Massachusetts, who killed herself hours before her mortgage company was scheduled to auction her foreclosed home. In Balderrama's case, the debt was a home mortgage. But Ehrenreich tells us:

Suicide is becoming an increasingly popular response to debt. James Scurlock’s brilliant documentary, Maxed Out, features the families of two college students who killed themselves after being overwhelmed by credit card debt. “All the people we talked to had considered suicide at least once,” Scurlock told a gathering of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in 2007. According to the Los Angeles Times, lawyers in the audience backed him up, “describing clients who showed up at their offices with cyanide, or threatened, ‘If you don’t help me, I’ve got a gun in my car.’”

I argue that the college debt crisis is separate and apart from the credit card crisis, which gets a lot more coverage in the traditional media. But they overlap in the cases of many college students and their families, because college students use their credit cards to cover college expenses. An item published today illustrates that circumstance, too:

As the fall semester beckons and financial aid from parents and the government runs dry, more college students are turning to credit cards to pay not only for their textbooks, meals and transportation but also for tuition. A recent survey by U.S. Public Interest Research Groups found that two-thirds of college students have at least one card, 70 percent pay their own monthly bills and 24 percent have used their cards to help pay tuition. That helps explain why the average survey respondent will graduate with more than $2,600 in credit card debt, and those with student loans will owe nearly $3,000.

Andrew Kunka charged $4,000 to his credit card several years ago to help pay tuition at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Now a first-year law student at Rutgers University's Newark, N.J., campus, Kunka struggles to make the minimum payment on the card, which is nearly maxed out. "I feel like credit card companies target us because we really have no financial awareness," said Kunka, who's 22. "We're barely out of our homes, barely having experiences as adults, and they throw these things at us and they don't make you aware of what you're signing into."

In clicking through blogs during the past couple of weeks, I found another note that seems appropriate to share.

This comes from Alexa Breslin, a college student who has made a number of adjustments in her routines in order to attend college, including scaling back her social life and living in an apartment "whose entire square footage is probably the same as a smaller sized basement somewhere in suburbia. I share just about everything, including a room, closet, and desk. I, luckily, managed somehow to get my own bed and toothbrush."

Breslin says that she and others like her "depend on Christmas presents and birthday checks. We get jobs. We end up waiting tables, working in retail or some nine-to-five job we begin to loathe. Between paychecks, we skip meals and instead fill up on coffee or some other caffeine-induced beverage to get us through the day."

She tells this story:

I can faintly recall standing online at Mrs. Field’s cookie shop. I was much younger and it was Christmas time; the mall was packed. I stood patiently on the never-ending line with my parents anticipating which cookie I would get. When we got close to the cash register, I pressed my face to the glass to admire the sweet selection.

The young man who had been standing in front of us asked the employee how much a cookie was. “A dollar seventy-five,” she replied. The young man looked down into this wallet and quickly looked back up. “It’s a sad day when you can’t afford a cookie,” he said sadly and walked away. I remember wondering where his mother and father were to buy him a cookie and why they hadn’t given him enough money. Now, I’m well aware. He was in college.

Breslin quotes an item from the Chronicle of Higher Education that featured the perspective of Jacqueline Massary, a 20-year-old student at New York University. Massary told the Chronicle,

“My college debt affects everything I do and every decision I make. I don’t have leisure thinking. It makes me choose a major based on potential income instead of passion. It affects the jobs and internships I take, where I live, and how much money I can spend daily.”

In fact, not only does college debt affect the student personally, but family members as well. “I spend money, but it really affects the way my parents buy things because although the loans are in my name, they’re worried that because it costs so much if something happens, I won’t be able to pay,” Massary added.

Massary's not the only one quoted by the Chronicle. Janelle Jahnke, age 21, has cut out Starbucks coffee, she says. Ryan Donde, also 21, says he hasn't bought a cd in years.

As for herself, Breslin says she's adopted a simple strategy: "Plain and simple: we have to ride it out. Somewhere between all the complaining and whining we eventually have to realize it doesn’t get us any farther toward where we want to be."